In Praise of Certain Youthful Naivete

87. SANDI THOM, "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)"
Produced by Ian Brown; written by Gilbert & Thom
Hungry Dog/Legacy 03 2006 Did not make pop charts

Damn, do some people hate this song. I mean, really, really hate it. Try Googling the title and you'll see what I mean. The feeling seems to be strongest in the UK, which only makes sense since the single broke much wider there. But if you listened to some of these people, you would think that this woman is sanctioning genocide.

Listen, I get it. As you can probably tell, I'm an ex-punk, and I really do hate hippies. When you get right down to it, though, the thing that impresses me most about this lyric is the way it tries to yoke those two truly antithetical youth movements together, precisely because they have almost nothing in common. The bigger the dare, the more you impress me, and I love watching the specifics of this patently ridiculous pas de deux play out across these verses.

What most of the rabid antiThomians I've run across seem to miss about the song is that it's not just mindless ancestor worship. It isn't just another one of those everyone-in-my-parents'-generation-was-cooler-than-we-are songs. More like Smashmouth's "Walking on the Sun," this song is fully cognizant of the fact that many of those young rebels became old farts. Does it change anything when the heads of state play guitar? Well, no, as a matter of fact it doesn't, not for the most part (although Vaclav Havel's got to count for something, doesn't he?). It's not just that she missed the revolution(s). She has to deal with its decadent aftermath, and with the full knowledge as her own generation moves forward that subcultural rebellions sometimes change little more than style.

Plus I like the homemade percussion. On about the third hearing, I started thinking that that was the sound of barely suppressed rage being vented through the extremities so that Thom didn't blow out her vocal chords screaming in frustration. So apparently this time the hippies won. Who's up for a rematch?

A Word or Two about "Downtown Bands"

880. NEW YORK DOLLS, "Personality Crisis"
Produced by David Krebs, Steve Leber, Paul Nelson & Sylvain Sylvain; written by David Johansen & Johnny Thunders
1973 Did not make pop charts

881. LIVING COLOUR, "Cult Of Personality "
Produced by Mick Jagger & Ed Stasium; written by Living Colour
Epic 68611 1989 Billboard: # 13

"Downtown bands"--I've used the phrase at least once, and I probably should explain it before I get too much further. As far as I can tell, the phrase is specific to New York City. Bands that played Providence, for example, would never be referred to in that way, because in Providence a small club like Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel is in the same part of town as a big indoor arena like The Dunk. Both venues are "downtown," so the phrase is meaningless there. In New York, though, especially back when the Nokia was still a huge movie theatre called the Loews Astor Plaza and Bond's was only intermittently open, the big shows were in midtown, usually at the Garden, and the small clubs were all "downtown."

As my namechecks would suggest, the phrase's peak usage was probably limited in time as well, mostly to the 70s and 80s, maybe a little into the 90s. It reflects, not just a geogaphical or demographic distinction, but a cultural one as well: a two-tiered vision of the local music scene, not quite an avant garde, more of an ersatz bohemia, centered most famously around CBGBs but also around other Village venues like Kenny's Castaways or even a little further north to the late, lamented Max's Kansas City. There was a certain reverse snob appeal to these venues, the idea being that the smaller the club was, the better (or more "authentic" the show) would be. In point of fact, quite a number of acts that later played arenas started out in clubs like this, but if you wanted bragging rights among the cool kids, you had to say you saw those bands in a small club first.

Did downtown bands actually sound any different, though? I don't know. Here are tracks from two exemplary downtown bands, both off their first albums, and the only telling aspect of their sound is how clean it isn't. Instruments and vocals are falling all over each other here. There's no real attempt to separate out each element so that we can hear the lyrics and parts distinctly. It's more like listening to Louis Armstrong playing fills in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band than listening to the carefully crafted (if still improvisational) sonic architecture of the Hot 5s and 7s.

Indeed, one could argue that the downtown rock scene was to New York in the 1970s and 1980s what transplanted New Orleans jazz was to Chicago in the 1920s. More precisely, if we can move beyond Armstrong, downtown bands were to both New York and popular music in the 1970s what bebop combos were in the 1940s: an escape valve for an artform that had moved from cult to mainstream in too short a time for its diehard fans to fully absorb the shock. This is no knock on the mainstream pop forms of those eras--as you can probably tell, I'm very fond of arena rock and I'm as likely to listen to swing as I am to bebop--but rock was going through an identity crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, just as jazz was in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, the two-tiered performance system allowed the connoisseurs a listening space of their own, even if some of us still liked sampling both kinds of performance.

If this means, however, that around about 2020 some restaurants are going to start serving "punk brunch" on Sundays . . . well, that's where I draw the line.

This Is Our Moment, This Is Our Time

700. 10,000 MANIACS, "These Are Days"
Produced by Paul Fox; written by Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant
Elektra 64700 1992 Billboard # 66

For a moment, a very brief moment, this particular 10,000 Maniacs song captured its time in history, which is only appropriate since it's a song about making sure that remarkable times don't pass without proper notation. The lyrics concern themselves with personal rather than public history, with the flush of youth and how intense your feelings and insights can be in that phase of your life. The singer is clearly beyond that phase, but she isn't rueful or judgmental. She's just telling the young person to whom she is speaking that she should remember this moment. She should (in the words of an earlier song that was less historical and more universal than most people appreciated at the time of its release) keep your eyes wide/the chance won't come again.

Buck and Merchant's lyrics here aren't particularly inspired, not even on the rough-hewn level that Dylan's had been thirty years before. As with the Stooges' "T.V. Eye," it's the music that carries the real meaning here. This was the one single above all else where that odd mix of old folkie instruments that the Maniacs liked to play actually gelled. All that strumming makes it feel as if something is bubbling under the surface for the whole song. The lyrics may adopt the perspective of a slightly older person looking back on her youth, but the music still exists in that glorious, giddy, inchoate moment, where the visions are inspired and come fast and furious, just before one needs to think about translating them into concrete plans. In my own version of this kind of youthful moment the guitars rocked a lot harder, but I still concede the general resemblance.

The historical moment this song captured, in spite of itself, was the dawn of the Clinton era. I can even give you a date and an approximate time: 21 January 1993, maybe around 10 o'clock at night. That was the night of the Clinton Inaugural, and 10,000 Maniacs were one of the featured acts at the Rock the Vote Ball because they were, as Dennis Miller pointed out in his introduction of them, Chelsea Clinton's favorite band. There were better performances that night--1/2 of U2 combined with 1/2 of REM to do a boffo a capella version of "One" (which actually is a great song); Don Henley sang "Dirty Laundry" as if it were the night of the Gary Hart inaugural; and Michael Stipe combined with Merchant and the Maniacs to do a version of "To Sir with Love" that made me seriously reconsider all those bad things I had previously said about Lulu--but, even with all that, "These Are Days" was unquestionably the song for that night. If you hunt up the band's performance that night on YouTube, you'll see that they all knew it, especially Merchant. Never before and never since/I promise.

As they took the stage that night, 10,000 Maniacs almost certainly knew that they would be breaking up very soon. There was pretty much just a valedictory performance on MTV Unplugged (as opposed to all that mad shredding they usually did in concert), and it was all over. Merchant went solo and the rest of the band just limped along. By the summer, this song was being used for promos for Class of '96, a Fox series about college life that starred, among others, Kari Wuhrer.

And Bill Clinton? Sometimes it's hard to remember how much he did accomplish as President, because the shutdown, the sexual relations, and the rise of global terrorism just loom so large in retrospect. But the truth is, no President could have accomplished what we wanted him to accomplish when he took that oath of office. Even if he hadn't been a sex addict, he was still just a mortal, not the angel Gabriel.

Pay no attention to the date and timestamp on this entry--I'm writing it at 11:17 pm Tuesday 3 June 2008 and I haven't felt this hopeful about my country since all the way back then. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid to hope this much, because . . . well, because of history. I know all the things that can go wrong. I know how politicians can let you down. I know that the most secure way to be is smug and cynical and sarcastic and pragmatic. At my age, I'm supposed to have outgrown the stupid credulity of youth.

But I still remember knowing how it was meant to be. And there's a man over there who's daring me to be foolish, daring me to hope. Even though I'm supposed to be wiser than that, I might just take him up on it.

Wind It Up One Time, Wind It Back Once More

638. RIHANNA, "Pon de Replay"
Produced by Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken; written by Alisha Brooks, Vada Nobles, Evan Rogers, and Carl Sturken
Def Jam 9885427 2005 Billboard # 2

As you can tell from previous entries, I'm not big on the whole "once they broke wide, they sold out" mythology of pop music.

However . . . in some cases, it might just fit.

Don't get me wrong: I find Rihanna as entertaining as the next person. I've already included "Rehab" in this list, and before I'm done I may include one or two more of her tracks. But for me, Rihanna has never again been as fun as she was on this first single. Sure, it is a mass-produced, dancefloor-ready track, but I do feel as if there's a person in there somewhere singing it. She might even be enjoying herself. In some of Rihanna's later singles, though, even the ones I like, I often can't find the person for the polish.

In pop as in politics, the key to building a successful brand is basing the star's mega-image in authentic, still-visible scraps of her/his spontaneous character. Rihanna started out as Bill Clinton, but lately I feel as if she's been pulling a John Kerry. Get back to the dancefloor, girl. Maybe kick off the stilettos and slip back into a pair of sneakers.

Sprechen Sie Popp?

199. NENA, "99 Luftballons"
Produced by ; written by
Epic 04108 1983 Billboard # 2

200. FALCO, "Rock Me Amadeus"
Produced by ; written by
A & M 2821 1986 Billboard # 1

Maybe it was MTV (which took American pop stars a bit by surprise), maybe it was the decadent phase of the Cold War, but the 1980s was probably the peak of Europop in the United States. In widely circulated English versions, one of these singles made the top of the charts, the other almost did, but both songs also got a fair amount of stateside airplay in their original versions. Originally, both songs were cut, not in German, but in a breathlessly wonderful Deutschlish patois that spat American culture back across the Atlantic in that sweet love-hate manner that elder European nations tend to adopt when regarding their bratty younger sibling.

They may have hated our politics back then (heck, many of us hated "our" politics back then), but they loved our music. In the early 1980s, just as white Englishmen were much less self-conscious about singing soul than their American counterparts, white Germans were much less self-conscious about attempting rap. As all these words spewed out of their mouths, Nena and Falco both charmed their Anglophone listeners in part because they seemed to have no idea how precariously they teetered on the brink of parody. In both cases, I think speaking in German helped: everything sounds just a little bit more hardedged when you're bringing those blended consonants up from the back of the throat.

No Soap, Radio (or T.V., as the Case May Be)

733. STOOGES, "T.V. Eye"
Produced by Don Gallucci; written by the Stooges
1970 Did not make pop charts

Metaphors again, this time of the private kind.

Do you really need to know what someone is saying in order to know what they're saying? Philosophers and semioticians have struggled with this question for ages. Some would settle it by deferring to the debates of Austin and Searle's speech-act theory. Others would affirm that Fernand de Saussure wrestled this one to the ground and won on points almost a century ago.

I, on the other hand, prefer a more pragmatic approach. For me, the acid test for that particular conundrum is this particular Stooges track. For years, I thought that the "T.V." here was a reference to closed-circuit surveillance. I had assumed it meant something like "she's watching me closely," the flipside (if you will) of Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" twenty-five years down the road.

But no. As I discovered when reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's fascinating Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, during the late 1960s and early 1970s "T.V." was apparently a specific piece of Ann Arbor music scene slang. It referred to a "Vibe" allegedly emanating from . . . well, from a specific part of a woman's anatomy as designated by a term I was not brought up to use. In any case, there were no monitors, cameras, or cables involved. Apparently, the technology was wireless, even back during the Nixon administration.

So it turns out, I didn't know what Iggy was saying. But the thing is, I did. The instruments told me what was going on in this scene even if the lyrics that were supposed to describe it were willfully obfuscatory. Great songs don't just signify on a single, verbal level, which is why English professors shouldn't be let within a mile of rock and roll. As D. H. Lawrence should have said, trust the band, not the frontman.

I Prefer Their Reallllly Early Stuff

829. ALL THE QUEEN'S MEN, "Mirror"
Produced by Elisha Hoffman, Jody Spence, and All the Queen's Men; written by Amanda Williams
1997 Did not make pop charts


My friend Cathy's old band. From the EP they put out with the lead singer who left shortly after. You have absolutely no chance of finding it--we bought it at their Mercury Lounge show--but I can dupe the file for you if you want.

Oh yeah--like with 1001 tracks, you wouldn't thrown in at least one nepotistic ringer . . .

No Interpretation Required

411. BUZZCOCKS, "Orgasm Addict"
Produced by Martin Rushent; written by Howard Devoto & Pete Shelley
1978 Did not make pop charts

Back in the dominant era of album rock, one of my friends always maintained that, if you didn't know what was going on in an AOR song, it was about either heroin or masturbation. This song was about the latter, but you didn't need the printed lyrics to know that, nor did you need to spend much time interpreting what you heard. And that's reason # 5,237 why punk was brilliant, necessary, and wicked cool.

Lamest. Stalker. Ever.

867. TOMMY TUTONE, "867-5309/Jenny"
Produced by Chuck Plotkin; written by Alex Call and Jim Keller
Columbia 02646 1982 Billboard # 4

Forget the video: does anyone really think we need to call out the cops on this guy? For God's sake, George Michael sounds creepier in "Father Figure." And speaking of men's rooms, I've always wondered if there really is someone named Jenny at that number or whether it's just a practical joke that a bunch of drunk guys are playing on their [male] roommate. (It happens more than you'd think, people.)

It's legitimate to ask whether this song would be as fondly remembered by some if it had been produced in any other era than the early 1980s. It stands halfway between the sad case of the paranoid boyfriend in the Rays' "Silhouettes (on the Shade)" and the non-stop male gaze of our own era. Less New Wave than opportunistic ex-singer-songwriter, this is what happens when someone pours his heart out and finds he's a couple of gallons short. You want to believe this song is ironic, but I'm not so sure. . . .

You Can't Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms, But . . .

671. 10,000 MANIACS, "What's the Matter Here?"
Produced by Peter Asher; written by Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant
Elektra 69388 1988 Billboard # 80

672. SUZANNE VEGA, "Luka"
Produced by Ronald K. Fierstein; written by Suzanne Vega
A & M 2937 1987 Billboard # 3

Codes vs. referents leading to a confused listening experience. Blame it on postmodernism, pop production, or (everybody's favorite target for projection) Ronald Reagan, as you wish.

If you pay any attention to lyrics, it's obvious what these two songs are about: child abuse.
So how did they get so high on the pop charts? Well, they're hummable, and even danceable, which are not necessarily qualities I look for in songs designed to raise awareness of previously ignored social problems. In both cases, I can remember djs doing these flip leadins and tags for these songs when playing them on the radio. One announcer I had formerly liked ever referred to the 10,000 Maniacs track as "Whatsamattayou?" in a jokey Italian dialect that I had thought had gone out with Pat Cooper records.

Some of the fault lies with the performers too, particularly the Maniacs. Natalie Merchant sounds as if she's having too much fun on this track. Maybe she is, maybe she enjoys telling off her stuckup albeit abusive neighbor, but that's not really the point now, is it? Then there's that jokey postmodern sleeve for the 45, which just signals ironic distance.

Don't get me wrong: I love not taking serious things too seriously. I'm part of the generation that took the overly precious hippie slogan "You Can't Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms" and added the words "But You Can Sure as Hell Teach It a Lesson" for our very own heartwarming bumper sticker. So no, I don't think you always have to be glum when singing about serious things. However, I do think that, no matter what kind of attitude s/he cops, a serious artist should never let her/his work help people forget things to which they should be paying attention. Falldown funny or painfully morose, art is always about getting you to see something you never saw before. It should never give you an easy out to avoid pain and discomfort.

That's ultimately why Vega's song is the more artistically successful of the two, although I don't think I'll ever understand why it charted this high. The Maniacs' track is about their rage and their superior insight, and I feel as if the kid gets forgotten in the mix. Vega's song, however, attempts to reproduce the kid's voice, and the avoidance here is true to the situation. Both the song and Vega's performance ask you to go beyond the surface and figure out the things that aren't explicitly said. I still think this is a tragic case of a folk singer adding too many instruments in the studio to what should always have been a bare acoustic song, but still it's a noble attempt. It gets you to ask questions, which is one of the many reasons we have art.

Because "Assailant" Scans Better than "Perpetrator"

911. WYCLEF JEAN ft/MARY J. BLIGE, "911"
Produced by Wyclef Jean and Salaam Remi; written by Jerry Duplessis & Wyclef Jean
Sony 79460 2000 Billboard # 38

Not to be confused with the Cyndi Lauper quickie B-side, which is best listened to alone.

As I believe the record will reflect, I am a big fan of metaphor. What's more, I believe the best metaphors are the ones that you beat like a dead horse almost to the point of allegory, and my man Clef is certainly doing that here. At points in this single, the language gets so tangled, it's hard to tell if Clef's in real or figurative danger, if he's been truly felled by a love supreme or if he's just on the verge of being shot by a jealous spouse.

Ultimately, though, this song is more about a feeling than a specific set of circumstances. Especially when you take Blige's contribution into account (the best guestshot on The Eclefic, an album filled with much less successful appearances by well-known soul and r & b performers), this song is desperately operatic in a way that pop balladeers have found it hard to be since the heyday of Phil Spector. Since the 1980s, most pop ballads have fallen into one of two categories: vapid or ironic. In our century, wallowing in the full-on bathos of something as scary as love and passion is just so Your Mother's Pop Music.

But this is the love the old folks warned you about. And no matter how smart you think you are, trust me: you're never really ready for the bullet with your name on it.

Hail to the Fool

912. PUBLIC ENEMY, "911 Is a Joke"
Produced by Carl Ryder, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Hans Shocklee, and Keith Shocklee; written by Flavor Flav, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, and Keith Shocklee
Def Jam 73309 1990 Billboard # 34

Because back in the day, children, Flavor Flav was not a clown--he was a Fool. Cracking wise and speaking truth, here he is in his finest hour, not merely serving as a comic foil for Chuck D but holding the whole single by himself, being seriously funny. Social commentary you can dance to and sing along on the chorus for? That makes the upper half of the Hot 100? Hell yes that's a day that we should feel nostalgic for.

She Stood Just Like Bill Wyman

499. SMITHEREENS, "Behind the Wall of Sleep"
Produced by Don Dixon; written by Pat DiNizio
1986 Did not make pop charts

When I first heard this single I remember thinking: a boy is singing about a girl in the band. Hmmm. That's a milestone for pop, especially from willful retrotasters like the Smithereens. Okay, he's stalking her--we didn't say "stalk" so much back then, "getting creepy" worked well enough--but still it's not just the girl in the audience crushing on the guy. That's got to count for something.

At the time, I actually had to look up (pre-internet, I'll have you know) who Jeanie Shrimpton was, and when I showed her picture to a few friends they all agreed that he had to be singing about Michael Steele, formerly of the Runaways, then of the Bangles.


Well, we saw a resemblance, especially since they both had red hair.

In any case, it's nice to live now in an age where a female bassist is neither unknown nor exotic. Although I still hope the bassists are getting respect. It shouldn't always be the frontwoman who pulls in the fans.

At the Center, and in the Spotlight

500. SLEATER-KINNEY, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"
Produced and written by Sleater-Kinney
1997 Did not make pop charts

If I could pick one track that was at the heart of this project, this would be it. Why? I'll list just five or six reasons:

(1) It features a strong female band. There has been no greater change in rock and roll since 1980 than the fact that women are now commonplace in rock.

(2) It gives central mythic significance to the Ramones, which is only right and proper since the Ramones are at the center of the modern history of the Western world. Take that, Beatlemaniacs. And oh yes the fact that it was written in the year the Ramones broke up makes it even sweeter.

(3) The song plays very cleverly with the false distinction between pop and art, parodying the posing of underground rock clubs (come downtown/put on your best frown) while admitting the dirty little secret at the heart of most of the ridiculously named "alternative" music of the 1990s: everybody wants to be a rock and roll star. They all want to be wildly popular with adoring fans. They just don't want to be bland while doing it. But the idea that artistic merit is inevitably in inverse proportion to popularity is sophomoric and should be grown out of by any serious artist in a form as innately popular as rock. Otherwise, in the unlikely event that they do hit the jackpot, they will end up as twisted in knots and suicidal as Kurt Cobain (who, like S-K, came from the Great Northwest, so you can toss out your purely environmental theories of depression).

(4) For at least five years, Sleater-Kinney were the queens of rock and roll, hands down, no dispute. But please don't ask me to choose between Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker for the title of Absolute Queen. Can't they just rule together?

(5) For thousands of girls who, unlike S-K and Patti Smith, couldn't make the gender leap, these three women were their Joey Ramones, the same way that the Beatles were Joey's, and Chuck Berry was the Beatles', and so on and so on, probably going back to King David and his mad lyrework way back in the day.

(6) It's what I thought. It's rock and roll. uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah uh yeah :)

You know, if I could somehow tie this track into the last three decades of hiphop, it would be at the heart of this project. Well, at least I can put it at the center.

While America Slept

501. RAMONES, "I Wanna Be Sedated"
Produced by Tommy Erdelyi & Ed Stasium; written by the Ramones
1978 Did not make pop charts

502. SONIC YOUTH, "Teenage Riot"
Produced by Nick Sansano; written by Sonic Youth
1987 Did not make pop charts

Two songs about rock bands, a bracket of narcolepsy to cover a decade.

When the Ramones recorded "I Wanna Be Sedated," it was a narrowly biographical work, just a song about a desperate urge to block out the bombardment of sensation that attended a nonstop tour, one that the band sometimes seemed to be on for its entire existence.

Very quickly, though, the song became an anthem, maybe one of the most widely recognized rock songs ever that never made the Billboard Hot 100. That in itself says something. The song didn't hit suddenly. It spread like a virus. Once exposed ,75% of the youth who heard it could never get it out of their heads. Yes, that was what it felt like, even if you weren't in a rock band: jesus christ it's just too much make it stop just give me my head back from all this overstimulation sure I'll try ritalin whatever.

Fast forward nine years to Sonic Youth, everybody's new favorite downtown New York band, who sometimes played Ramones covers for their encores at Maxwell's, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s. (Because of Manhattan's draconian cabaret laws, the best club the New York scene had in the 1980s was in Hoboken, New Jersey.) Despite their affinity, Sonic Youth was in some ways the Ramones' mirror image. The Ramones always wanted to be widely popular but ended up serving a sizable cult. Sonic Youth always wanted to be a cult band and tried to hide their true love of pop under an overcompensating level of postmodern winking. They knew enough Madonna to cover her in the late 80s but hid it under the moniker of Ciccone Youth; they covered the Carpenters's best song, but they did it for a pro-choice benefit album.

The most important difference, though, is one of time: in "I Wanna Be Sedated," Joey Ramone wanted to keep sleeping; in "Teenage Riot," Thurston Moore wants to wake up. And while the Ramones aren't singing about anything more than a rock and roll tour, Sonic Youth is purposefully singing about something much larger. As critics realized from the second Daydream Nation (the album on which the song appears) was released twenty years ago, this is an indictment of young apathy in the Reagan era, and it's pretty scathing if surprisingly indirect.

As a member of the generation under indictment here, I could point to all sorts of things that we successfully resisted in those years--apartheid, US involvement in Central America, etc.--but the very fact that I'm emphasizing resistance rather than direct political confrontation might be enough to constitute yet another charge against semi-conscious ol' us. But your honor, you can't indict an entire generation on the basis of just two rock and roll songs. Look at all that these other, worthy, alternative teens accomplished in that decade, the ones who didn't fritter away their time going to rock clubs. Basta. We slept, in part because we were tired of the 60s, which seemed to drag on endlessly into the 70s, and of hippies and their phony Beatlemania and their endless to-do lists because the planet was never perfect enough for them.

Eventually, we did wake up, but we should have set the alarm earlier. We had too much to do that day.

Drunk & Unsure White Men Gotta Do What Drunk & Unsure White Men Gotta Do

258. BIG & RICH, "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy"
Produced by Paul Worley; written by Big Kenny & John Rich
WEA 6501 2004 Billboard # 56

259. STREETS, "Fit but You Know It"
Produced and written by Mike Skinner
Locked On 679L071CD1 2004 Did not make pop charts

These two singles mark the moment when I found it finally undeniable, almost thirty years after Sugarhill Gang, that rap had gone mainstream. The only thing whiter than country musicians are pasty-faced Brits, for whom calling a woman out on her spray tan is the ultimate form of drunken irreverence. Both groups, though, are out of their element: Big & Rich in a northern city, possibly New York, and the Streets on holiday somewhere. And so, like legions of drunk and unsure white men before them, they decide to emulate the black men they've heard and seen in popular culture as a way of acquiring courage. They do it in their own way, though, and the results are hilarious--on purpose, I think. We're laughing with them, not at them, right? You can't exactly say that either of these groups has (ahem) flow, but you have to love the self-consciousness with which they wield their newfound mackdaddy personae.

Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am

632. DAVID BOWIE, "Suffragette City"
Produced and written by David Bowie
RCA Victor 0719 1972 Did not make pop charts

I'm young enough that I don't really remember much of the public events of the early 1970s directly, at least not before Watergate. I experienced most of that period by refraction, but one of the things that makes perfect sense to me is that everyone who was into rock in the early 1970s seems to have loved David Bowie. How could you not? According to John Lydon's autobiography, Bowie was practically the only musician that British youths wouldn't fight over during that period: proto-punks, pub rockers, art school posers, they all found something to adore in him. Bowie rocked hard and glammed up. He was simultaneously macho and fey. More than anything, he was many heterosexual women's dream: sensitive like a gay man but still sexually available.

Obviously, one of the great things about glam is that it made explicit in popular culture a spectrum of masculinity, just as feminism was emphasizing in the public culture of that same period that there was and should be a spectrum of femininity or womanhood. Some of this had to do with gay and lesbian liberation during this period, but it also augured a second, connected revolution, because it was about gender as well as sexual orientation. Gender didn't have to be a trap, even if you were straight. There wasn't just one way to be straight. You could choose what kind of a man or a woman you wanted to be.

In my hometown during the Bowie era, a lot of this particular culture war seemed to have boiled down to hair. I remember the older generation being very disturbed over the fact that there were all these "unisex" barber shops opening up. Of course, the word "unisex" seemed to scare them in and of itself, but beyond that I believe many men of my dad's generation saw the barber shop as a male place. Why would you want to let women into it? Would you really want a woman to cut your hair? How could you talk to her the way you talk to a guy while he's cutting it? Women couldn't cut a man's hair anymore than they could serve him a drink at his favorite bar. Those were places where a man went to be with other men, and you shouldn't say in mixed company what a man thought of any woman who could be found in places like that.

In retrospect, I find it appropriate that the first unisex barber shop that I remember opening in my hometown was called "Broadway Joe's." It wasn't on Broadway (we didn't have a Broadway), but it was almost certainly named after "Broadway" Joe Namath, the proud and preening quarterback who led the New York Jets to one of the most surprising Super Bowl victories ever. Namath was a ladies' man and he was a fop. He did an infamous TV commercial wearing pantyhose, and still no one questioned either his masculinity or his heterosexuality.

It would be pushing it to say that Joe Namath was America's Bowie, but he did herald a similar transformation for our culture, which would lead by the end of the decade to jewelry, hair gel, and blowdryers for men, not to mention comfort at a surprisingly localized level with women in what had formerly been wholly male enclaves. For a while, my wife and I got our hair cut by the same woman, and all the bartenders at my favorite pub are female, and it seems unspeakably odd to me that there ever could have been a question about any of this.

Plus, as this particular Bowie B-side suggests, for many straight men, there can be a bit of a charge to women not only being equal to but sometimes stronger than they are. Don't listen to Phyllis Schafly and her generational descendants: feminism doesn't kill male heterosexuality. It enhances it.

A Shard of Cultural HoStory

436. LUDACRIS, "Area Codes"
Produced by Ludacris and Chaka Zulu; written by Phalon Alexander, Chris Bridges, N. Hale, and B. Nichols
Def Jam 588671 2001 Billboard # 24

Can you remember when cellphones were the equivalent of Star Trek communicators, when the very fact that Fox Mulder had one in his hand all the time made him one of the most futuristic people on the planet? It almost seems quaint now, doesn't it?

Chris Bridges could obviously learn a little something about speaking respectfully to and about women, but in recording this single he did perform a public service: he captured a very precise moment in time, when cellphones were no longer uncommon but area codes still meant something. Because, seriously, today, does a 617 area code tell you anything about the person you're calling? Only that they were in eastern Massachusetts at some point in their lives. They could be living anywhere now, including down the hall or block from you. Area codes are no longer exotic. They may tell you about someone's past history but not about their current geography. For that, you need to track them using the GPS signature in their phone, and I'm sure some hiphop romantic (MC Jaq Bauer?) is out there right now trying out a series of rhymes on that topic that should be hitting the pop charts in time for the 10th anniversary of Ludacris' national epic.

Not that Cris would be caught dead calling a 617 woman. As one brave soul at cominganarchy.com has demonstrated, his calling patterns hew to a distinct geographical spread:

MY ACADEMY

812. MISSION OF BURMA, "Academy Fight Song"
Produced by Richard Harte; written by Clint Conley
1981 Did not make pop charts

If you weren't alive (or paying attention) in the 1980s, you may not understand how important local scenes were back then--not just in their own right, but as slow feeders to a regionally pluralistic national music scene. Michael Azzerad deals with this obliquely in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Gina Arnold much much better in Route 666: The Road to Nirvana, but both of them focus mostly on the local clubs. Far more interesting to me was local FM radio. In retrospect, the early 80s seems like a golden age (all golden ages exist in retrospect, of course), a highly fortunate moment in time that came after punk led to an explosion of small DIY bands but before FM radio became totally corporatized. Even after many FM stations were absorbed by corporate media conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity, there was still, for a little while, a commitment to local music: sponsoring local battles of the bands; doing long in-studio interviews with local artists; even playing nightly countdowns of the top 5 local singles. In our own era, when playlists are not only tightly controlled but set nationally rather than locally, such freedom and regional divergence seems unthinkable.

As you can tell from earlier entries, I spent the 80s in the Boston area. By the end of the decade the cool station was supposed to be WFNX, but the pioneer FM station in Boston was and would always be WBCN. They broadcast live from the Rat in Kenmore Square and promoted local bands so heavily that some touring rockers playing the Garden, Great Woods, or Foxboro would wonder why their opening acts were getting more applause than they were. The program director at BCN for most of these years was a guy who went by the name of Oedipus. He was one of the first djs outside of New York to realize how important the Ramones were going to be to the history of popular music--and if that doesn't establish his aesthetic cred, then there clearly is no hope for you.

My point is that, in the early 1980s, FM radio cultivated a kind of rock "provincialism." I'm using the word in the sense that the novelist Hamlin Garland used it in Crumbling Idols, a book of essays published almost a century before I ever set foot in the Rat. Very near the end of the nineteenth century, Garland saw the future of literature in the cultivation of local literary cultures that would in turn feed a national and even global redefinition of art. He saw Dostoyevsky as a Provincial artist, but he didn't think that meant that younger novelists like Stephen Crane should write like a Russian. They should write like themselves, about where they were. In seeing the larger world freshly through avowedly localized eyes, they would expand the vision of artists everywhere.

If I had to pick one band that exemplified the Boston scene in the early 1980s, it would be Mission of Burma. They played other cities, they've reformed and actually played Brooklyn earlier this year, but they never really broke anywhere except in Boston. "Academy Fight Song" was their first single, and it seemed primed to be embraced by soi-disant high school misfits everywhere, or maybe just people who never really outgrew the attitudes of high school. The sound of the single is sludgy and choppy, but even with the subject matter you'd never mistake it for a Dead Boys opus.

Which is my point actually. Maybe you had to be there, but to me this song sounds like Kenmore Square, even though the Rat's been torn down and there's a hotel there now, and even though I never actually saw MoB live. (I did see Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, one of the band's eventual splinters.) This single sounds like Boston in the early 80s, and you could never mistake Mission of Burma for a New York band, an Orange County band, a Minneapolis band, or a Cleveland band from that period, anymore than a jazz fan could confuse the sound of a purely Kansas City band from the 1930s with the Red Bank inflections that Count Basie added to the K.C. sound.

But then there's the two-way genius of provincialism: the local becomes the national, which feeds back into the local again, albeit in another locality. Bands from other scenes listened to MoB, even if their fans didn't in significant numbers, and they were in turn influenced what I may be alone in calling "the Boston sound." Most prominent among these was R.E.M., who of course eventually hit the big time. I'm willing to bet that at one point more people knew "Academy Fight Song" as a song R.E.M. played than as a song that Mission of Burma originated. Many may not have known it was a cover.

And I swear, sometimes when I listen to R.E.M., particularly when they're rocking rather than whining, I can hear Mission of Burma. I wonder if that makes Athens' favorite sons a Boston band.

The Vinegar Tasters c. 1970

21. JUDY COLLINS, "Both Sides Now"
Produced by Mark Abramson; written by Joni Mitchell
Elektra 45639 1968 Billboard # 8

22. HOLE, "Clouds"
Produced by Kim Gordon and Don Fleming; written by Joni Mitchell
1991 Did not make pop charts

23. JONI MITCHELL, "Both Sides Now"
Produced by Paul Rothchild; written by Joni Mitchell
1969 Did not make pop charts

Behold the Vinegar Tasters! The illustration above is supposed to be an allegorical representation of three major Asian philosophies, with the three men around the barrel of vinegar meant to represent (from left to right) Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-Tse. The copy I've put up of the woodcut in question is pretty murky, but I'm told you're supposed to read their facial expressions as sour, bitter, and smiling in that order, indicating the affective bent of their views on the pain of earthly existence.

If we made a similar triptych of Joni Mitchell, Courtney Love, and Judy Collins gathered around this song, their expressions would not exactly match those of Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-Tse, but there would be a certain correspondence. Collins' version remains, I think, the most widely known and by far the sunniest interpretation of the song. Even if you could somehow remove that Mitch Milleresque glockenspiel from the arrangement, Collins still seems to grant only lip service in her performance to the downside of life. She may say that she recalls life's illusions, but she seems to be embracing them too. Collins, like Lao-Tse, seems to believe that even the vinegar of life is part of the natural order.

Courtney Love and the rest of Hole, however, seem to be the Buddhists in this interpretative picture. In Love's defense, she was allegedly forced by her hippie parents to sing this song repeatedly at the dinner table growing up, and that's enough to drive anyone to make a dirge out of even the most innocuous tune. But if Collins seems inclined to stress the Win side of life, Hole seems equally as inclined to stress the Lose side of the equation. Something's gained for Collins in living every day, but much more is lost for the members of Hole. Like Buddha, Love and her friends seem inclined to find life to be a world of dust, pain, and illusion. (And after all, wasn't it Buddha who taught his followers to seek Nirvana?)

And then there's Joni, who actually wrote the song, of course, and who serves as the Confucius of this philosophical hootenanny. Her accompaniment for the song is so simple that one probably doesn't notice it. It's just an acoustic guitar--"just," as if an experienced guitarist can't make her instrument speak with dozens of different voices and intents. Both Collins and Hole pile on the instruments in their arrangements, pile on the noise, to support willful sunniness or cloudiness as their temperaments lead them. Mitchell, though, just strums with a pick, adding a little figure at the end of each refrain that grows more tentative with each verse. And her strumming hits the downbeat so hard each time in most measures that one could easily interpret it as the other shoe of fate dropping, no matter what the singer thinks or plans. As far as her vocal is concerned, she's not angry the way Love is, nor is she bravely facing the deluge the way Collins may be. She just seems . . . resigned.


So who's the optimist in this picture? Who's the nihilist? Who's the realist? Like almost everything else in this life, it's open to interpretation.

. . . And Lead Me through This World of Self

374. PINK, "Just Like a Pill"
Produced and written by Dallas Austin & Pink
BMG International 95965 2002 Billboard #: 8

375. ROLLING STONES, "One Hit (to the Body)"
Produced by "The Glimmer Twins"; written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, & Ron Wood
Rolling Stones 05906 1986 Billboard # 28

376. RIHANNA, "Rehab"
Produced by Evan Rogers & Carl Sturken; written by S. Carter, S. Smith, & S. Taylor
2007 Did not make pop charts

377. AMY WINEHOUSE, "Rehab"
Produced by Mark Ronson; written by Amy Winehouse
Universal 1717823 2007 Billboard # 9

378. WARREN ZEVON, "Detox Mansion"
Produced by Niko Bolas, Richard Wachtel, and Warren Zevon; written by Jorge Calderon & Warren Zevon
1987 Did not make pop charts

379. WARREN ZEVON, "Splendid Isolation"
Produced by Duncan Aldrich, Andrew Slater, and Warren Zevon; written by Warren Zevon
1989 Did not make pop charts

In the early twentieth century, they called it "drying out." By the end of the century, it had somehow become "rehab." That's short for "rehabilitation," of course--which is funny in a sick sort of way, because by the time they started calling this "rehabilitation," most of the programs that had formerly sponsored social "rehabilitation" in wayward Americans had declined almost to the point of obsolescence. We don't "rehabilitate" prisoners anymore, for example--we just incarcerate them for a maximum/minimum sentence. All prisoners are considered irrevocably unredeemable, but somehow substance-abusing celebrities always deserve yet another chance.

In practice, the best word for what happens to celebrities at Betty Ford or Promises may be "detox": 30 days (or 70, if you're Amy Winehouse) to get your chosen poison out of your bloodstream. Then you're back to Malibu or Tribeca or wherever. There's supposed to be a behavior modification component involved, a commitment to staying away from the sorts of friends and activities that lead to bad decisions, but anyone who even casually follows the tabloids knows how well that usually works out.

The truth is that the last half of the twentieth century turned the Western world into a society of addicts. It may not have been that more addictive substances were available than ever before (do you have any idea how much alcohol the average American consumed during the 1830s?), but rather that the therapeutic language of addiction seeped into our wider culture. Even people who had never been in therapy or counseling started talking like psychiatrists or social workers. As usually happens when any specialized discourse comes into general usage, the language of addiction studies became omnipresent. Addiction became a common explanation for all sorts of personal failings, not to mention an inevitable metaphor.

Pink, the Rolling Stones, and Rihanna, to choose just three instances, all see love and desire as addiction: Pink hooked after a first use like a proverbial young person experimenting with crack (yes, I know crack doesn't come in pills, but the metaphor still fits); the Stones deep into a bad habit, probably heroin, that is punishing them physically and yet requiring greater and greater doses for even the most rudimentary of highs (and at least one of the Stones obviously knows something about that); and Rihanna, understanding the same cycle of bliss and masochism that the Stones sing about but seeking treatment to "wean myself off of you." Writers use metaphors to make the unfamiliar familiar, and it is striking that all three of these songs assume that the listener understands drug addiction but may not really understand love or desire, at least not in the sense that the singer does. Cab Calloway may have fetishized marijuana in "Reefer Man" and Cole Porter may have slyly alluded to cocaine in the original lyric of "I Get a Kick out of You," but neither assumed the familiarity with controlled substances that these songwriters assume. The pop world really has changed since the 1960s.

For Amy Winehouse, of course, rehab is not a metaphor but a pending social engagement. Her single broke globally in early 2007--the Year of Rehab, if you will--and much of the rest of the year felt like a process of waiting for the other shoe to drop. No, as a matter of fact, your daddy doesn't say you're fine. Now will you go? As Bonnie Raitt discovered for herself shortly before Winehouse's birth, listening to blues records isn't necessarily the best way of kicking booze and drugs. You can do group therapy, counseling, etc., and come back writing and performing maybe better than you ever did before.

Even more than Raitt, though, the person Winehouse should really seek advice from is unfortunately dead, but much of his wisdom about life, love, and addiction is there in his songs. Warren Zevon was a great many things to the history of rock and roll--wit, satirist, legendary partyer, brilliant lyricist, underappreciated pianist--but maybe more than any of those, he was the greatest recovering alcoholic that American songwriting has ever seen. That is to say, the songs he wrote after his recovery in the late 1980s may be even better than the more widely circulated songs on his three great albums from the 1970s. I'll have much more to say about Zevon and his songwriting in later entries, but for the purposes of this one, let me focus on his two greatest songs about his alcoholism, one obviously so, the other not so much.

In the 80s, Zevon very publicly entered Betty Ford, and everyone knew that his next album would have some commentary on it. Those of us who considered ourselves his fans were all hoping that recovery wouldn't turn him into a weepy wuss the way it had with so many other rockers--and it didn't. "Detox Mansion" is every bit the Betty Ford satire we wanted it to be, naming names and giving out the daily schedule, making recovering celebrities an object of spectacle if not outright ridicule. And it rocks.

I've often thought, though, that "Splendid Isolation" never got the attention it deserved, possibly because the track was on Transverse City, an album that only aficionados got into. The word "addiction" is never used once in the song, but the ideas and scenes in this lyric could be right out of a celeb-studded AA meeting. The alienation and lack of connection Zevon details here are exactly the sort of self-pitying anomie that addicts and celebrities often have in common. Bruce Springsteen once told a reporter that you don't need to be a millionaire to isolate yourself like Elvis, all you need is a sixpack, but certainly the disconnected life of a celebrity, without the daily functions that keep so many of the rest of us grounded, makes it easier to give in to tendencies they might have anyway. Hence Winehouse, Richards, Raitt et al.

I wish anyone struggling with addiction well, whether they're widely known or otherwise obscure. I pray that, in the end, they may all find themselves as redeemed and rehabilitated as my favorite pop trickster, St. Warren.

In His Dreams, More Like It

666. BECK, "Devil's Haircut"
Produced by the Dust Brothers; written by Beck, John King, and Michael Simpson
DGC/Bongload 22222 1996 Billboard # 94

And it's buzzed, because you know the Jesus freaks have it down past their shoulders. Come to think of it, Hansen himself could do with a trim . . .

Well I'm Not Sure I'd Stay but . . .

942. CHER, "If I Could Turn Back Time"
Produced and written by Diane Warren
Geffen 22886 1989 Billboard: # 3

The ultimate comeback number--by no means the best, but absolutely the ultimate. In fact, while this song is almost nonsensical as a plea to a former lover, it makes perfect sense as a plea from an artist to the audience that she foolishly abandoned. Forgive me the marriages, forgive me the plastic surgery, I can't be what I used to but let's pretend that I am. The song comes nowhere near even wonderful 70s cheese like "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves," the arrangement is that unimaginatively tight drone that characterized so much Top 10 80s pop, she can't hit the notes she used to, it all goes on too long . . . but you know what? Somehow, I forgive her.

I--Am Tired--of Your--Abuse!

792. BLACK FLAG, "Rise Above"
Produced by Black Flag; written by Greg Ginn
1981 Did not make pop charts

Who said there no protest songs in the 1980s? Okay, it's admittedly a pretty generalized protest song, more a voicing of general discontent than a focused, issue-oriented program for social change. But it's so peppy and energetic! And at this point in Black Flag's history, the band is still keeping frontman Henry Rollins in his pomo Ziggy Stardust place. It makes you want to go out and tell off your boss or parent--politely but firmly.

How Dirty Vibes Get Clean

189. LIL JON & THE EAST SIDE BOYZ ft/YING YANG TWINS, "Get Low"
Produced by Emperor Search, Bryan Leach, Lil Jon, Rob McDowell; written by D. Holmes, E. Jackson, S. Norris, & Jonathan Smith
TVT 2394 2002 Billboard #: 2

190. USHER, "Yeah!"
Produced by Usher Raymond; written by Chris Bridges, Sean Garrett, LaMarquis Mark Jefferson, Rob McDowell, James Phillips, Jonathan Smith, & Patrick J. Que Smith
Arista 59149 2004 Billboard: # 1

The life cycle of a pop style in just two singles.


Crunk, like gangsta before it, can present a problem for some listeners. In the best crunk singles, the vibe is slammin, but the lyrics can give you pause. Lil Jon's "Get Low" is an obvious example of this: it has a great dance groove that makes you want to get out on the floor, but its lyrics (about a trip to a strip club) can make you want to take a shower after listening. Even the trembling vocals of the East Side Boyz on some of the verses can make you feel a little shaky.

Fast forward two years, and here's Lil Jon again, this time fronting for Usher. You know: sweet, cleancut, sexy but not sleazy Usher. The poor boy's being cornered by a girl in a club. He's so cute that you've got to believe that this happens to him all the time. But this girl is something special, her power is almost hypnotic, and soon enough he's caught up in a 21st century Billie Jean scenario. None of it is his fault, you see?

The two songs, of course, have essentially the same groove, and this is how you make dirty music clean: Ludacris and Lil Jon serve as Usher's dirtyminded wingmen; Usher just plays it smooth and "Aw shucks"es his way through the song. In "Get Low," Lil Jon and his boys talk it up, but let's be serious: they're almost certainly going home alone. In this song, Usher presents himself as more acted upon than acting, but he is probably not going home alone. The earlier single is filthier and more explicit, but this song more strongly implies the possibility of actual sex, sex that the singer will probably explain away tomorrow as something that "just happened."

And then there's the whole question of where the two songs are set. "Get Low" seems to be set in a strip club, but by the end of the song there's a shoutout to all the girls on the dance floor, suggesting that the performer now thinks he's in a dance club. (The song in fact did lead to a popular line dance that pretty much corresponds to the instructions in the chorus.) "Yeah" seems to be set in a dance club, but the featured performers' interpolated guest flows sound no different than what we heard in the earlier single.

So which is worse: frankly crass objectification of women, or the smooth rationalization that explains it away? You know what? I'm not entirely sure that that's the real question. I think the real question is why everyone seems to be confusing dance clubs with strip clubs in the first place.